Another reason for the Volunteers, would be so that the Confederation can push young Solomani towards the frontier from the interior.

While after their enlistment is up, the Navy offers them transportation to any Confederation planet within reason or their homeworld, the idea is that they'll want to settle on the frontier, which acts as the additional advantage of creating veteran colonies.

I'm sure that the Confederation has a less paramilitary Peace Corps equivalent to act as their evangelistic instrument.

I will state that I didn't consciously try to conjure them to be Spacemarine Chapters, it's just that when I reflected, they seem awfully derivative. Maybe parallel evolution.

Cavalry squadrons are supposed to be capped at two hundred and ninety permanent personnel, whereas the Smurfs dictate a thousand directly. The Forty Kay variant is based on the classic regimental establishment, whereas mine is to stop short of one man less of what's usually considered the lowest number for an infantry battalion.

The commanding officer would be The Captain, though for what appears to be a heavily reinforced company, you'd usually bump that to major; but Captain fulfills both roles as head of the company, and that of the starship. There can be only one, and he's both ground troops and ship commander.

Since a cavalry squadron would at least need to be nominally independent, it has an organic flight department that flies and maintains the starships and smallcraft attached to the squadron, hence Captain.

Listening to Frank Chadwick mention that you didn't want to waste your best pilots on missions with an estimated casualty rate of twenty percent, and would probably prefer to send in militia level pilots, reminded me that's how I envisioned the Solomani military saw things as well.

The two aspects, other than the romantic one that Chadwick mentions about having meat bodies in cockpits, is that it's easier to manufacture smaller hulls in quantity, and that the Solomani need numbers to match the Imperium's advantages both in technology and sheer size, so they'll surge by drafting all available pilots not needed for other missions and commercial purposes.

If you assume a carrier is a steel box with hangar facilities, you can also assume those are a lot easier and cheaper to build, or convert, than manufacturing dedicated warships.

Of course, the Confederation Navy has to prepare the groundwork by training as many pilots as possible, and adding to a large existing pool of (semi) trained flight crews, and preparing easily manufactured ship designs that are easy and cheap to build, simple to fly and operate.

Misunderstanding. Condottiere thought you meant wafer jacking the pilots from the Carrier and running the fighters as human linked drones. You mean wafer jacking the pilot in the cockpit with flight programs so they can skip training and just get the skills slotted in and out of the pilots head, I think.

Now, in my opinion, the Lightning Two is a not just a piece of crap, it's an overpriced piece of crap.

However, I think the Americans do have modern air warfare pretty well conceptualized.

The Raptors are the tip of the spear, followed by the "stealthed" Lightnings, who control a small swarm of drones.

Behind them are second tier aircraft, Growlers for electromagnetic noise, unstealthy fighter bombers, and behind them tankers (which seems unlikely we'll need) and cee three eye pickets as the major hub of an interconnected communications and surveillance system, the Lightnings being minor hubs.

Realistically, you'd send drones out in space battles, the question becomes whether they are autonomous, or coordinate back with their motherships and/or command ships, which encounters lag time, and possibly electronic interference.

The thing about drones is, you can manufacture them on demand, you don't have to train them, they don't sleep, and you don't have to pay out pensions.

You have to figure out a cost benefit model that makes manned militia fighters a viable and attractive option, within the framework of Traveller, not just pure cannonfodder.

Realistically, you'd send drones out in space battles, the question becomes whether they are autonomous, or coordinate back with their motherships and/or command ships, which encounters lag time, and possibly electronic interference.

I don't know about you, but that seems like one helluva engineering feat, since the extra five tonnes indicates it's one single unit.

My take on the Confederation Navy is that the largest jump drive they will manufacture is twenty five hundred tonnes, plus five, at technological level fourteen, but up nine of them can be linked together, though I vaguely recall Tee Five at one time giving the option for eighty one.

Like a RAID drive, the combined array function as the lowest performing module, so sometimes it's just better to delink that module.

In case no one got the implication behind the Tigress jump drive, it's the size of a medium cruiser.

It's not the Empire's Project Stardust, but building jump drives of that size requires a lot of concentration of resources and specialized facilities, and there might be only a handful of systems in the Imperium where they can manufacture such large engines.

Next up for the standard Confederation jump drive module comes in at two hundred and fifty five tonnes which defaults at ten thousand parsec tonnes.

Under the new character generation system, all Navy recruits become familiar with piloting spaceships, so essentially, you incur no extraordinary costs having a pilot available for any number of spaceships in the order of battle.

Virtual crewing costs five million schmuckers at technological level thirteen with a competence level of one for five positions, including pilot; flight crew seem to have a one third chance of picking up another pilot level per year.

Virtualization two wouldn't normally be available for the Confederation, since it requires technological level fifteen, so pilots are essentially free, compared to the United States Air Force estimate of a ten million buck investment per.